Nancy + Static Content + OWIN + SystemWeb

I’ve just started working with Nancy to create a new site. It’s going to be hosted on IIS and I decided to try and take the OWIN approach. When I got to the part of managing static content I ran into some problems, mainly not getting it to work. Read on for the solution!

The Problem

My site uses some CSS and Javascript files, and likes to resolve it to /js and /css. According to the wiki, this should be simple enough, stick them into /Content and map them. In my Bootstrapper, I have the following:

protected override void ConfigureConventions(NancyConventions conventions)
{
    base.ConfigureConventions(conventions);

    conventions.StaticContentsConventions.Add(StaticContentConventionBuilder.AddDirectory("/css", @"/Content/Styles"));
    conventions.StaticContentsConventions.Add(StaticContentConventionBuilder.AddDirectory("/js", @"/Content/Scripts"));
}

Reload and … nothing! Upon further inspection, I saw my requests for files in /js returned a 404 instead of the file.

The Solution

As it turns out, when you use Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb, you need some additional configuration to get static content working.

Inside your OWIN Startup.cs, you need:

using Microsoft.Owin.Extensions;
using Owin;

public class Startup
{
    public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
    {
        app.UseNancy();
        app.UseStageMarker(PipelineStage.MapHandler);
    }
}

And inside your Web.config you need to have:

<system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
</system.webServer>

With those two changes, static content is being served correctly.